Giving Compass' Take:

• Louisiana's TOPS scholarship was intended to support low-income students through college, but because of rising costs of tuition, the scholarships are primarily used by well-off white families. 

• How can the scholarship be returned to its original purpose? How can public policy lower the cost of tuition for all public school students?

• First-generation college students require more support to get through college. 1vyG is helping them get Ivy League degrees. 

Louisiana, for the past three decades, has offered to pay in-state tuition for any student who earns a 2.5 GPA and an ACT score of 20.As Louisiana faces a $1 billion budget shortfall, Gov. John Bel Edwards has proposed cutting the scholarship, formally called the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students or TOPS.

TOPS is the oldest state merit scholarship in the nation. But since TOPS was created in 1989 as a program expressly meant to serve low-income students, it has ballooned in size. About a quarter of the state’s 200,000 college students use the stipend each year.

The trouble started in 2008 when Gov. Bobby Jindal took office and sliced the state’s higher education budget in half. To offset the cuts, most colleges and universities raised their tuition — some by as much as 140 percent. Because TOPS pays for a student’s tuition, no matter the cost, the amount of state money needed to meet the scholarship’s promise jumped as schools raised the price.

The makeup of the recipients changed, too. As tuition went up, more upper- and middle-class families started taking advantage of the free money. The share of scholarship students from Louisiana’s wealthiest families nearly doubled over the last decade. Last year, more than half of the scholarships went to children whose parents earned $70,000 or more annually. Fewer than 15 percent of students come from the low-income families Taylor originally targeted.

Read the full article on TOPS by Casey Parks at The Hechinger Report